Otto Kirchheimer

Otto Kirchheimer (* 11. November 1905 in Heilbronn , † 22. November 1965 in Washington, DC ) was a socialist embossed German - American State - and constitutional lawyer , who worked in Germany, France and the United States. He is considered one of the most important German state and constitutional theorists .

Life

Born into a Jewish family from Kirchheim, he attended school in Heilbronn, Heidelberg and Ettenheim from 1912 to 1924. He then studied law and sociology in Munich , Cologne , Berlin and Bonn . In 1928 he completed his studies with a doctorate (Dr. jur., Magna cum laude ) from the University of Bonn. He had received his doctorate from Carl Schmitt with the thesis on the state theory of socialism and Bolshevism . In Bonn, Kirchheimer was considered Schmitt's “favorite student”.

Kirchheimer acknowledged his socialist sentiments as early as his youth . Later he was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany .

From 1930 to 1933 Kirchheimer worked for the social democratic magazine Die Gesellschaft and lectured on political science at the commercial college. From 1932 to 1933 he also worked as a lawyer in Berlin.

During the Weimar Republic, the young Kirchheimer emerged with sensational analyzes of the relationship between social structure and constitution. His Weimar essay was much discussed, and what then? Origin and present of the Weimar Constitution , Berlin 1930, in which Kirchheimer had described the Weimar Constitution as a non-sustainable state basis.

Together with Ernst Fraenkel and Franz Leopold Neumann , Kirchheimer was close to the conservative constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt . In 1932 Kirchheimer published an article in the socialist magazine Die Gesellschaft entitled Legalität und Legitimität ( Die Gesellschaft , Volume 2, Issue 7, 1932). Carl Schmitt adopted this title for a famous font of the same name that appeared in September 1932. He expressly referred to Kirchheimer with praise. Schmitt Kirchheimer had also repeatedly quoted elsewhere. In 1929 he wrote in an essay on fascism: “In highly developed industrial countries [...] the internal political situation is completely dominated by the phenomenon of the 'social equilibrium structure' between capital and labor, employer and employee. This phenomenon, probably first recognized and named by Otto Bauer , was then treated by O. Kirchheimer in an interesting article in the Zeitschrift für Politik (Volume 17, 1928, p. 596) in terms of state and constitutional theory. ”(Carl Schmitt: Wesen and Becoming the Fascist State. In: Ders .: Positions and Concepts , 1940, pp. 124–130, here p. 127). In Legality and Legitimacy Schmitt wrote: “That is why I consider the formulation of Otto Kirchheimer's essay on legality and legitimacy ( Die Gesellschaft , July 1932) to be correct, which says that the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy 'only exists in its legality' and today 'obviously the legal barrier is equated with legitimacy' ”(Carl Schmitt: Legitimität und Legitimität , p. 14). Kirchheimer, for his part, reciprocated by making positive references to Schmitt. In an essay from 1932 it was said: “If a later time sifts through the intellectual existence of this epoch, then Carl Schmitt's book on legality and legitimacy will present itself to it as a work that emerges from this group both through its going back to the Foundations of state theory as well as their reluctance to draw conclusions. ”( Constitutional reaction , 1932. In: Die Gesellschaft , Volume 9, 1932, p. 415 ff.)

After the National Socialists came to power, the socialist Jew Kirchheimer emigrated to Paris. Here he worked for four years as a scientist in the French branch of the International Institute for Social Research ( Horkheimer Institute). He began to rework Georg Rusche's Punishment and Social Structure . The Rusche-Kirchheimer version of Punishment and Social Structure was published in 1939 as the institute's first English-language publication. Kirchheimer was busy with the redesign from winter 1937 to summer 1938. Kirchheimer had broken with his teacher Carl Schmitt, who had risen to become the “Crown Lawyer of the Third Reich” in National Socialist Germany.

On November 11, 1937 Kirchheimer emigrated to the United States with his wife Hilde Kirchheimer and their daughter Hanna (born 1930). The marriage was divorced there in 1941. In New York Kirchheimer continued his work for the International Institute of Social Research as a research assistant for law and social sciences, 1937 to 1942. At the same time he was a lecturer for the institute program at Columbia University .

In 1943 Kirchheimer moved with his second wife, Anne Rosenthal, to Washington, DC , where their son Peter was born in 1945. The lawyer initially worked part-time for one year (1943 to 1944), then from 1944 to 1952 full-time as a research analyst in the Research and Analysis Branch of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) , a forerunner of the CIA . On November 16, 1943, Kirchheimer received American citizenship. He was visiting professor of sociology at Wellesley College (1943). He also worked as a lecturer at the American University (1951 to 1952) and at Howard University (1952 to 1954). From 1952 to 1956 Otto Kirchheimer was head of the Central Europe section of the service in the State Department. Kirchheimer left the OSS and accepted a visiting professorship at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research (1954). The next year he became a full professor of political science there (until 1961). Here he wrote his book Political Justice. The Use of Legal Procedures for Political Ends , which was completed in 1961. 1960 to 1965 Kirchheimer was Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. From 1961 to 1962 he was also a Fulbright Professor at the University of Freiburg .

On November 22, 1965, Kirchheimer died of a heart attack while trying to board a plane at Dulles Airport . He was buried on January 18, 1966 in the Jewish cemetery in Heilbronn .

plant

Otto Kirchheimer saw himself as a “manufacturer of political analyzes”, whose aim was “to decipher government systems in full activity, to diagnose them or, in his mind, to substitute better ones for them”.

Kirchheimer began his journalistic activities as a young socialist in the Weimar Republic. The focus of his work here was the relationship between the constitution and social structure as well as the analysis of the social balance of power and its impact on constitutional law. Using various examples, he examined the tension between the political “legal order” and the economic “power order”. Kirchheimer shared with Carl Schmitt the rejection of parliamentarism and the criticism of pluralism. Kirchheimer is therefore also assigned to "left Schmittianism". Wilhelm Hennis had brought the agreement between the two thinkers to the concise formula: "Schmitt's methods for left-wing purposes". For Kirchheimer and Schmitt, a parliamentary consensus in the class state was in principle impossible. For both of them, the majority system was tied to the requirement of homogeneity, because otherwise it would not be parliament that decides on politics, but economic power complexes. Kirchheimer viewed the Weimar Constitution only as an episode. It is an outdated legal mechanism that inevitably has to fail due to the real balance of power. Therefore, as early as 1930, he asked the question: "Weimar and what then?"

After the National Socialists came to power, the focus of Kirchheimer's work shifted to the analysis of “German fascism”. Kirchheimer explicitly opposed the thesis of a dual state that his comrade-in-arms from Weimar days, Ernst Fraenkel , had put forward. He also turned against the view of the Frankfurt School, according to which the National Socialist primacy of politics had transformed monopoly capitalism into state capitalism. Similar to Franz Leopold Neumann's Behemoth. The structure and practice of National Socialism 1933–1944 also existed with Kirchheimer, areas of sovereignty that were decoupled from the state and whose politics were determined by the power struggle of different power groups. As with Neumann, there can be no structurally uniform state power for Kirchheimer under National Socialism, so the Third Reich appears as an "unstate". According to Kirchheimer - again in a Schmittian way - the social groups of the state and its functions, which they divide up among themselves, take over. This would create a juxtaposition and opposition of different power complexes, in which the question of binding decision-making authority would remain open.

In the post-war period, Kirchheimer's main topics were the analysis of German and Central European post-war developments and the investigation of the forms and effects of “political justice”. In his late work of the same name, Kirchheimer described the problem of the rule of law creeping through political exclusion through normal law or the "use of legal procedural options for political purposes", as the subtitle of the study read. Kirchheimer spoke of political justice “when courts are used for political purposes so that the field of political action can be expanded and secured. The way political justice works is that the political actions of groups and individuals are subjected to judicial scrutiny. Such judicial control of actions is aimed at those who want to consolidate their own position and weaken that of their political opponents ”( Politische Justiz , p. 606).

Kirchheimer was one of the nestors of comparative party research. His writings on the transformation of Western European party systems, with the thesis contained therein of a trend towards an all-world party ("catch-all party") and an associated "decline of the opposition", are considered masterpieces of the field. In the course of a de-ideologization , so Kirchheimer's thesis, the major parties of the Western European countries converged, and the "ideological parties" on a denominational or class-structural basis transformed into everyday parties.

Although Kirchheimer did not return to Germany after 1945, his theories exerted a considerable influence on the constitution of political science in Germany as well.

Collected Writings

At the University of Greifswald, an edition of Kirchheimer's collected writings was compiled in six individual volumes from 2015 to 2020 under the direction of Hubertus Buchstein . The edition project was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the period October 2015 to September 2018.

The following volumes were published:

• Otto Kirchheimer: Collected writings. Volume 1: Law and Politics in the Weimar Republic , ed. v. Hubertus Buchstein, Baden-Baden 2017, ISBN 978-3-8487-3928-8 .
• Otto Kirchheimer: Collected writings. Volume 2: Fascism, Democracy and Capitalism , ed. v. Hubertus Buchstein and Henning Hochstein, Baden-Baden 2018, ISBN 978-3-8487-4732-0 .
• Otto Kirchheimer: Collected writings. Volume 3: Kriminologische Schriften , ed. v. Hubertus Buchstein and Lisa Klingsporn, Baden-Baden 2019, ISBN 978-3-8487-4733-7 .
• Otto Kirchheimer: Collected writings. Volume 4: Political Justice and Change in the Rule of Law , ed. v. Lisa Klingsporn, Merete Peetz and Christiane Wilke, Baden-Baden 2019, ISBN 978-3-8487-4734-4 .
• Otto Kirchheimer: Collected writings. Volume 5: Political Systems in Post-War Europe , ed. by Hubertus Buchstein and Moritz Langfeldt with the collaboration of Henning Hochstein, Lisa Klingsporn and Merete Peets, Baden-Baden 2020, ISBN 978-3-8487-4735-1 .
• Otto Kirchheimer: Collected writings. Volume 6: Political Analyzes for the OSS and Department of State , ed. v. Henning Hochstein and Frank Schal, Baden-Baden 2020, ISBN 978-3-8487-4736-8 .

Fonts

• On the state doctrine of socialism and Bolshevism. Heymann, Berlin 1928.
• Weimar - and what then? Origin and present of the Weimar Constitution. Laub, Berlin 1930.
• The limits of expropriation. De Gruyter, Berlin 1930.
• with Georg Rusche : Punishment and Social Structure. Columbia University Press, New York 1939.
  • Social structure and prison system. European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main, Cologne 1974.
• Political Justice. The Use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1961.
  • Political Justice. Use of legal process options for political purposes. From the American by Arcadius Rudolf Lang Gurland . Luchterhand, Neuwied 1965.
  • as paperback: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg 1993, ISBN 3-434-46203-1 .
• Politics and Constitution. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1964; New edition 1981.
• Political rule. Five contributions to the doctrine of the state. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1967; New edition 1981 (collection of articles).
• Politics, Law and Social Change. Selected essays by Otto Kirchheimer. New York, London 1969.
• Functions of the state and the constitution. 10 analyzes. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1972 (collection of articles).
• From the Weimar Republic to fascism. The dissolution of the democratic legal order. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1976 (collection of articles).

literature

• Riccardo Bavaj : Otto Kirchheimer's criticism of parliamentarism in the Weimar Republic. A case of "left Schmittianism"? In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . Vol. 55 (2007), H. 1, pp. 33-51 ( PDF file ).
• Roland Czada : "Manufacturer of Political Analyzes". On the topicality of the work and person of Otto Kirchheimer. A conference report. In: Journal for Social Research. Vol. 26 (1986), No. 1, pp. 107-113 ( PDF file; 95 kB ).
• Alexandra Kemmerer: Controversy on the Weimar Constitution. The long discussed question: Is there a left Schmittianism? can be studied using the example of the work of the left Schmitt student Otto Kirchheimer. A report on new literature. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , No. 25 v. January 30, 2008, p. N3.
• Raffaele Laudani (Ed.): Secret Reports on Nazi Germany. The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort. With contributions by Franz Neumann , Herbert Marcuse and Otto Kirchheimer. Foreword by Raymond Geuss . Princeton University Press, Princeton 2013, ISBN 978-0-691-13413-0 .
  • German edition: In the fight against Nazi Germany. The Reports of the Frankfurt School for the American Secret Service 1943–1949 , ed. v. Raffaele Laudani, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt 2016, ISBN 978-3-593-50345-5 .
• Wolfgang Luthardt, Alfons Söllner (Ed.): Constitutional State, Sovereignty, Pluralism. Otto Kirchheimer in memory. Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1989, ISBN 3-531-12025-5 .
• Volker Neumann : constitutional theory of political antipodes. Otto Kirchheimer and Carl Schmitt. In: Critical Justice . 1981, no. 14, p. 31 ff.
• Robert Christian van Ooyen , Frank bowl (ed.): Critical constitutional politics. The understanding of the state by Otto Kirchheimer (= understanding of the state. Volume 37). Nomos, Baden-Baden 2011, ISBN 978-3-8329-5404-8 .
• Samuel Salzborn : Kirchheimer, Otto. In: Rüdiger Voigt , Ulrich Weiß (Hrsg.): Handbuch Staatsdenker. Steiner, Stuttgart 2010, p. 210 f. ( PDF file ).
• Frank Schal : Between commitment and skepticism. A study on the writings of Otto Kirchheimer. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2006, ISBN 3-8329-2255-5 .
• Ernst C. Stiefel , Frank Mecklenburg: German lawyers in American exile (1933–1950). Mohr, Tübingen 1991, ISBN 3-16-145688-2 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Otto Kirchheimer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Otto Kirchheimer Papers, 1929–1972 at the State University of New York (with curriculum vitae in tabular form)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cf. Rolf Wiggershaus : The Frankfurt School. History - Theoretical Effect - Political Significance , Munich 2008, p. 262.
2. ^ Burial after the entry on Otto Kirchheimer in the HEUSS database of the Heilbronn City Archives , contemporary history collection, call number ZS-12721.
3. ^ Roland Czada: Maker of political analyzes. In: Journal for Social Research. 26th year, issue 1, 1986, p. 109 ( online , PDF file; 95 kB).
4. ^ Research .
5. ↑ The work of Otto Kirchheimer and its relevance to the present. A conversation between Helmut König and Hubertus Buchstein (Part I) , theorieblog.de, February 3, 2020 .